The largest national park in the USA is bigger than Switzerland. Here are
twenty facts to celebrate the birthday of the stateside National Parks
Service

The National Parks service is 98 today. The service is responsible for 401 areas covering more than 84 million acres in every state, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. As well as being responsible for the 59 national parks in the USA, the service protects monuments, battlefields, military parks, historical parks, historic sites, lakeshores, seashores, recreation areas, scenic rivers and trail and the White House.

To make the birthday of the National Parks Service, here are some fascinating facts about some of the sites it takes care of.

1. Sequoia National Park, California is home to the largest living single-stem tree in the world - the wonderfully named General Sherman. The tree is approximately 275ft (84m) tall and weighs approximately 1,900 metric tonnes.

General Sherman's base (Alamy)

2. The highest point in North America is Mount McKinley (aka Denali) standing at 20,320ft (6193.5m). It is in Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

3. The parks are also home to the lowest point in the western hemisphere - Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California, which is 282 ft (86m) below sea level.

4. The longest cave system in the world is at Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky. Currently, there is more than 3454 miles of cave mapped, with more to come. The largest “room” in the portion of the cave system that has been discovered is two acres in size.

Mammoth Cave (Alamy)

5. Two national parks are located north of the Arctic Circle: the Gates of the Arctic National Park and the Kobuk Valley National Park, both in Alaska.

6. The largest park is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. According to the NPS, the park spans 13.2 million acres, an area bigger than Switzerland. It also covers three climate zones.

7. The smallest property owned by the National Parks Service is the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial, the house in Philadelphia where Kosciuszko, a Polish freedom fighter, lived for a time. It measures 0.02 acres.

8. White Sands National Monument spans more than 176,000 acres of New Mexico desert and contains the largest gypsum dune fields in the world.

White Sands National Monument (Alamy)

9. The oldest national park is Yellowstone, Wyoming which was founded in 1872. The most recent addition to the 59 national parks list is Pinnacles, California, which was added in 2013.

10. The “Old Faithful” geyser at Yellowstone is so-called because visitors can rely on it to erupt regularly, although it doesn’t erupt at predictable regular intervals such as every hour on the hour. Eruptions last from one and a half minutes to five minutes. Its maximum eruption height ranges from 90 to 184 ft.

11. Of all the 401 National Park sites, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt have the most sites named after them – four each.

12. The deepest lake in the United States is in Oregon - Crater Lake in the National Park of the same name. It is 1,932 ft (589m) deep, around five times the height of the Statue of Liberty.

13. The National Park of American Samoa is the only National Park Service site south of the equator. It covers 13,500 total acres - 9,500 land acres and 4,000 marine acres— which are mostly coral reefs.

14. There are almost 300 waterfalls in Yellowstone National Park. The highest plunge waterfall, confusingly named the Lower Falls of Yellowstone Falls, has a height of 308ft (94m).

15. The Florida Everglades is the only true tropical forest in the northern hemisphere. Because of this it is home to plants and animals you can’t find anywhere else, including the Florida Panther and twenty species of orchid.

The Florida Panther (Alamy)

16. Russell Cave National Monument, Alabama, has an almost continuous record of human habitation going back to at least 7000 BC.

17. There are 27,000 historic and prehistoric structures preserved within the National Parks System, including Aztec Ruins in New Mexico.

18. California and Alaska are the states with the most national parks – both have eight each.

19. The Grand Canyon is not the world’s deepest or longest canyon. That title is taken by Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in the Himalayas.

20. The National Parks System (including monuments and historic sites) drew 273.6 million visitors in 2013 with the most visited site being the Golden Gate recreation area, San Francisco . In the National Parks category, the top five most visited parks were (in ascending order): Olympic, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Great Smoky Mountains, which drew a staggering 9,354,695 visitors.